The Emotional Foundations of Personality

by Kenneth L Davis

  McDougall went on to give examples of complex emotions that included a sentiment. Jealousy resulted when the object of our love offers affection to a third party, such that we simultaneously feel personal pain and anger toward the third party. The vengeful emotion occurred when we are angered but are not able to assert ourselves and thus regain our positive self-feeling by “getting even.” Resentment resulted from the same conditions that provoke the vengefulness, but we are able to immediately avenge the situation and regain our positive self-feeling. Shame appeared after the development of the self-regarding sentiment and resulted when our own actions cause our status in the eyes of others to be lowered and thus may be negative self-feeling combined with anger directed at ourselves. McDougall included many others.

  These derived or blended emotions begin to sound like cooking recipes. Mix a cup of tender emotion with a bit of negative self-feeling, place in a sentiment, wait until something separates you from someone you care about (the object of your sentiment), and you will have a dose of sorrow. Combine equal parts of the tender emotion and anger, fuse them in the crucible of parenthood, and you will soon be spewing out reproachful statements like “Why do you do the things that you do!?” The blending of emotions seems plausible and similar to the trait blends suggested by Goldberg and colleagues (Hofstee et al., 1992), but much affective neuroscience work will be required for verification, and to this day that level of analysis has not been rigorously pursued.

  Supposedly, one could discern which emotions were linked with a complex emotion by observing which primary emotion motor tendencies were activated when one of these compound emotions was experienced, a claim that apparently was never empirically validated. In any event, most of these combinations are simply incapable of being studied in animals, even though progress is being made on some, such as optimism (Rygula, Pluta, & Popik, 2012) and regret (Steiner & Redish, 2014).

  AN OVERALL SUMMARY OF MCDOUGALL’S WORK

  McDougall’s observations led him to conclude that ancestral instincts were essential for understanding the motivations that energize our encounters with life. These “ancient instincts” provided the window into the “native tendencies of the mind.” Without instincts we would be like a steam engine without a fire to maintain hydraulic pressure in the system. He wrote, “Take away these instinctive dispositions with their powerful impulses, and the organism would become incapable of activity of any kind” (p. 38). This sounds like a statement a neuroscientist might make after observing an animal subjected to a complete lesion of the lateral hypothalamus or the periaqueductal gray, both of which destroy normal behavioral and consciousness abilities. So, we would generally concur with McDougall’s vision of the primary instincts, but he did not provide solid scientific entry points, neither behavioral-experimental nor neuroscientific, into clarifying concepts such as sentiments above and beyond speculative storytelling. If he had held fast to his animal comparative and clinical pathology criteria, he might have limited himself to a taxonomy of human motivation and behavior that would not be far different from the affective neuroscience conclusions one hundred years later.

  McDougall was also criticized for using instincts in an explanatory way. That is, he fell victim to the nominal fallacy—confusing naming with explaining. For example, saying that mothers care for their young because they have the parental instinct made it seem like parental behavior had been explained, but in reality, little more had been accomplished than naming the behavior. At worst, such practices rapidly became circular: the parenting instinct caused mothers to care for their young, and mothers cared for their young because they had a parenting instinct. Naming the parenting instinct added no explanation for why the mothers cared for their offspring, except perhaps to say that there may be evolutionary or genetic factors involved, which are reflected in the ways brains operate. Indeed, Darwin’s insights about emotions, important as they are historically, had the same problem, and we are confident that both Darwin and McDougall would have recognized this had they been part of the emerging experimental revolution in psychology. Still, they chose to speak up for reasonable perspectives about our nature, before we really had the robust scientific tools to illuminate such issues. So, while comparative naturalistic observations can provide relevance by identifying key behavior patterns found across a variety of species, the behavioral observations by themselves do not provide an explanation of the behaviors, and certainly not the mental experiences, except that that they were probably evolutionarily adaptive. However, with the development of the affective, behavioral, cognitive, and comparative neurosciences, we now have the capacity to break out of the circularity cycle and look for causes by studying and manipulating relevant areas of the brain and observing behavioral changes. And equally important, we can ask animals whether they like the feelings associated with those behavioral states, namely, whether artificial activations of those brain systems, or their relevant neurochemistries, are “rewarding” or “punishing,” and this currently remains our best empirical gateway to understanding their feelings.

  Still, these historical limitations do not detract from the conceptually insightful comparative analysis of basic emotions that McDougall provided at the beginning of the scientific era in psychology. If the worst that could be said was that McDougall did little more than name and describe personality-relevant behaviors, the same criticism might be made of many modern personality theorists, including the Big Five proponents. Indeed, Lewis Goldberg and Gerard Saucier (1995) have stated the factor-analytic Big Five tradition produces phenotypic traits that are descriptive rather that explanatory. In other words, even after having used a psychological test scale to determine that someone is an Extravert, nothing has been said about the cause and development of extraversion. The person has just been given a descriptive label that links his or her psychologically relevant behaviors to similar behaviors exhibited by other extraverted people. Affective neuroscience has aspired to take the next step: to actually begin characterizing how feelings arise from mammalian brains.

  Both McDougall and Darwin demonstrated the ageless power of the comparative method. At his best, McDougall built on Darwin’s previous observations and provided a short list of principles, as well as primary instincts and emotions that are not far from the model of affective neuroscience one hundred years later, which is certainly more modest (and hence incomplete) in its reach, but also more rigorous in its scientific substance. At present, the cross-species affective neuroscience approach is the best we have for decoding primal emotional feelings, but even it does not provide explicit ways to tackle the higher (tertiary-process) emotional feelings that tempted McDougall (as they do many modern psychologists). Whether animal research can aspire to understand those higher complexities such as optimism and regret (Rygula et al., 2012; Steiner & Redish, 2014) is an open issue. In Chapter 5 we review select early conceptual models of personality and present the three-level Nested BrainMind Hierarchy, a tool for facilitating such complex conversations about emotions.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Brief Review of Personality Since McDougall

  The Need for a Bottom-Up Model of Personality

  “Dynamic” has come to be used in a special sense: to designate a psychology which accepts as prevailingly fundamental the goal-directed (adaptive) character of behavior and attempts to discover and formulate the internal as well as the external factors which determine it. In so far as this psychology emphasized facts which for a long time have been and still are generally overlooked by academic investigators, it represents a protest against current scientific preoccupations. And since the occurrences which the specialized professor has omitted in his scheme of things are the very ones which the laity believe to be “most truly psychological,” the dynamicist must first perform the tedious and uninviting task of reiterating common sense.

  —Henry A. Murray, Explorations

  WHILE WILLIAM MCDOUGALL was one of the first to write a book about personality, many others followed that offer
ed comprehensive models attempting to explain how humans develop their consistent patterns of behavior. In this chapter, we briefly review a representative selection of personality models after McDougall and argue that personality theorists increasingly departed from the primary instincts and emotions that Darwin wrote about and that provided McDougall with his starting point.

  At the end of this chapter, we will reinforce our view that to fully understand human personality we need first to understand how feelings arise from our subcortical brains (feelings that, in general principles of operation, are shared homologously across mammalian brains) and how those primary emotional feelings are elaborated and complexified throughout our lives. Because affective feelings are survival indicators—with all positive/good feelings signaling potential thriving and all negative/bad feelings automatically projecting potential destruction—it seems likely that these brain circuits are major controllers of what we learn about the world. We will present a three-level, Nested BrainMind Hierarchy (NBH) model that may facilitate discussions about the fundamental sources of personality by clarifying the level at which the various discussions and disputes are taking place along a continuum: from the emergence and expression of primary emotions, to secondary learning and memory mechanisms that help us adapt to our specific environments, and to tertiary-level cerebral capacities that offer us abundant neurocomputational space to advance thinking, especially through the development and use of language (and ultimately mathematics). But first, we start with a short discussion about another early personality theorist who started with a fundamental base of primary emotions.

  FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

  Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was a contemporary of William McDougall (1871–1938). Fifteen years older than McDougall, Freud completed his first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900, just eight years before McDougall’s Introduction to Social Psychology (1908). Like McDougall, Freud based his theory on biological drives or instincts. Freud’s id was the reservoir of the life and death instincts. With some literary liberty, we would translate life as good feelings (i.e., affects that intrinsically predict survival), and death as bad feelings (feelings that predict potential destruction). In his early psychoanalytic writings, Freud focused on the sex instincts, or what we would call LUST. After World War I, Freud concluded that aggression—what we would include in the RAGE/Anger system—could be as potent a motive as sex.

  In his early years, before the development of psychoanalysis, Freud aspired to explain clinical disorders using cerebral anatomy (see Mark Solms’s forthcoming translation of Freud’s early neuroscientific investigations). However, Freud soon came to accept that the available neuroscience research tools would not provide him the answers he sought. It should be noted that the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society (founded in 2000 by Mark Solms) is dedicated to linking brain neuroscience with psychoanalysis, which is something that Freud openly dreamed about.

  So for the remainder of his clinical career, Freud pursued psychological-developmental theory and the treatment of psychopathology with psychoanalysis, which was his variation of a new method of therapy he had learned from a fellow Viennese physician Joseph Breuer, in which patients were cured by talking with their physician about their symptoms—their hopes and their worries. It is now generally recognized in psychiatry that frank discussions, with a receptively intelligent other, of where patients are in their affective life is solid path toward self-understanding, acceptance of life’s vicissitudes, and finding paths to well-being.

  We will not delve into the details of Freud’s theories—we assume the typical reader is already reasonably familiar with Freud’s work. However, we feel that Freud’s thinking was close to affective neuroscience in spirit, especially because he based his theory on inherited instincts that were ancestral “gifts,” many present at birth, which from Freud’s perspective over one hundred years ago were divided into unconscious libidinal and destructive drives. He was using unconscious in the typical way: not on the basis of understanding qualia (namely raw experience itself, on which affective neuroscience has focused) but, rather, on whether we are aware (ideally with some understanding) of these primal sources of mind.

  Retrospectively, we might suggest that the Victorian period in which he lived misled Freud to include infant nursing in what we would label the LUST system. In affective neuroscience terms, infant feeding would more likely belong in the homeostatic HUNGER system, which we would not include as a primary influence on personality. By contrast, emotional affection and bonding emerge from maternal CARE efforts and experiences. Although there is surely a substantial role for maternal nursing dynamics in infant social bonding, Harry Harlow’s experiments with surrogate artificial mothers suggested that the simple act of an inanimate “mother” feeding a baby was less relevant for socially bonding than the experience of maternal warmth and physical contact. We might also argue that maternal nursing would more likely involve maternal bonding to the infant via the mother’s intrinsic CARE system. Thus, out of lack of detailed knowledge of subcortical emotional systems, perhaps Freud overemphasized concepts like the “oral period” and “infant sexuality.” We simply do not yet have sufficient evidence on that point. Still, Freud’s thinking remained anchored in instinctual systems even as his theorizing became increasingly linked to his clinical practice and the specific life problems of clients.

  Along these lines, Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, which he felt accounted for the phenomenon of psychological repression, the symbolic content in dreams, and “slips of the tongue.” He is also credited with introducing transference, a concept that is highly developed in psychoanalysis but that for personality purposes can be thought of as how earlier significant relationships influence our subsequent relationships. Thus, Freud’s theorizing became increasingly conceptual and difficult to verify or even link to primary emotions. In the section that follows we continue this theme, showing how clinically based theories after Freud lost clear linkages to the primary emotional systems and came to represent ever more conceptual psychological approaches to pathology and personality.

  With the psychopharmacology revolution, Freud’s theories and psychoanalytic approaches lost influence in the academy. However, this is changing with the modern neuropsychoanalytic movement (see Panksepp & Solms, 2012), where interest in the neural nature of affect is intense (see Fotopoulou, 2010).

  JUNG’S ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

  The young Carl Jung became Freud’s closest follower, to the point that Freud, two decades older, decided Jung would be his successor. However, Jung eventually seceded from Freud’s inner circle, apparently because in his own psychoanalytic theory Jung came to reject Freud’s strong emphasis on sex. By 1914 Jung (1875–1961) had completely struck out on his own path.

  Jung’s analytical psychology did not include an id, which in many ways was replaced by his “collective unconscious.” For Jung the collective unconscious was the most powerful system in the psyche, and it contained the psychic traces of the human evolutionary past, including our prehuman ancestry. For Jung, the collective unconscious was a storehouse of inherited latent memories that predisposed us to react to the world in ways that were adaptive for our forefathers.

  This sounds rather Darwinian, except that Jung populated the collective unconscious with “archetypes,” which sounded more like higher-order cognitive concepts than subcortical emotional action systems. Jung derived his archetypes from mythology, religion, alchemy, and astrology but also found them in dreams and art. The most basic of Jung’s preformed concepts was the mother. A baby’s perception of its mother was guided by its mother archetype, followed by its actual experiences with its mother. However, Jung also proposed countless other supposedly innate archetypes, such as father, child, wise old man, earth mother, god, devil, hero, trickster, birth, death, separation, initiation, marriage, power, and magic. In addition, Jung argued there were archetypes that had evolved into separate systems within th
e personality, such as the anima, animus, persona, and shadow, plus striving for unity, which included the self-concept and was often expressed through the mandala symbol.

  Jung took his novel ideas and seceded from Freud’s inner circle, but he may not have escaped Freud’s Olympian stature. Jung attempted to move the Freudian system away from biologically driven conflict and development toward more cognitive motives and self-fulfillment goals. However, Jung was criticized for being mystical and outside the realm of what is needed to constitute scientific proof (as some would say, although science has only evidence for or against a theory). As such, Jung’s analytical psychology never had as strong an impact on the field of psychology as Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. In a survey of psychology historians, Freud was rated the most important psychological theorist, and Jung was rated 30th (Coan & Zagona, 1962). In a more recent assessment, Haggbloom et al. (2002) listed Freud as having more journal citations and textbook citations than anyone else, with Jung coming in at 50th and 40th, respectively, on these two lists.

  One area that keeps Jungian ideas alive is the widespread use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers & McCaulley, 1985), a popular personality assessment tool based on Jung’s theory of psychological types. Jung defined two major personality “attitudes,” labeled extraversion and introversion, and is credited with originating these terms. Extraversion is oriented toward the external, objective world, whereas introversion is oriented internally and subjectively. Complementing the two attitudes were Jung’s four psychological functions: thinking and feeling, and sensing and intuiting. The mother-daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers turned the opposing pair of attitudes (extraversion/introversion) and the two opposing pairs of functions (thinking/feeling and sensing/intuiting) into three bipolar scales. To this they added a fourth bipolar scale, judging/perceiving, that was initially used to determine whether an individual’s primary function was judging (thinking or feeling) or perceiving (sensing or intuiting).